Reviews for Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoĭ

The average rating for Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoĭ based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-04-15 00:00:00 Chris Garcia Introduction, by Clarence Brown Translator's Preface --Hope against Hope Postscript Appendix: A. Notes on Persons Mentioned in the Text B. Note on Literary Movements and Organizations Index

Review # 2 was written on 2007-08-09 00:00:00 Hannah E Kilburn Only a process that is very beautiful and very terrible could produce this book: the anguish of two human souls being tormented by a cruel, fiendishly clever, and virtually all-powerful State determined to murder both the body and soul of its victims. Whether we deserve to benefit as readers from the terrible tempering endured by the poet Osip Mandelstam and his widow Nadezhda Mandelstam is a matter that can be easily determined: we do not deserve it. We are not worthy of the Mandelstams. They belong to a very select group of all the human beings who have ever lived, most of whom we will never know. Thanks to her memoir, we do know Nadezhda and Osip. If Osip's great characteristic was his commitment to truth, Nadezhda's was her endurance (if this sounds dismissive recall that the New Testament repeatedly includes endurance as one of a short list of authentic signs of the divine Spirit). Her survival made possible the survival of (most) of Osip's poetry, and of the story of their lives, preserved in this unique memoir. Wordsworth defined poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility", and this memoir has something deeper than tranquility to it, a profound serenity, a luminous sadness, a fusion of love and truth which is the pivot on which human history revolves. It is clear from reading this book that Osip was one those described in the 11th chapter of Hebrews as those "of whom the world was not worthy". What better way to understand the industrial scale barbarisms of the twentieth century than to read about how they were observed and interpreted through the sensibilities of great poets and writers? Perhaps because of the relative brevity of the "Thousand Year Reich", we have had far more accounts from Hitler's victims than from Lenin and Stalin's victims. But the ones that did survive from the Soviet Union, not just HOPE AGAINST HOPE but works by Ginzburg, Brodsky, and Solzhenitsyn, are testaments of the human spirit of the same order as the those written by witnesses to the Holocaust. But the significance of HOPE AGAINST HOPE is not primarily its historical account of the Stalinist system, but its depiction of cosmic injustice and the possibility--even in the worst circumstances--for some kind of ultimate triumph of truth and integrity and decency and love. I doubt that a person picking up this book on a whim will read it through, unless, without knowing it, they have been preparing themselves for years to understand what Osip and Nadezhda have to tell us about ourselves and about the human potential for choosing truth and acting with moral courage. That was true for me. I bought this book twenty years ago, and although I started it a couple of times, I have only just read it after all that time it has been on my shelves. Paradoxically, although it's a life-changing book, perhaps one's life has to have already changed, or begun to change, before one can engage with it. There is so much to reflect on in HOPE AGAINST HOPE. It is clear, for example, that although he died at the age of 46 in one of Stalin's camps, Osip was spiritually far advanced of the level achieved by Nadezhda herself in old age as she writes this memoir. She faithfully reports her long-dead husband's remarks and opinions without, in many cases, quite understanding them. This is to be expected: what is anybody to make of an observation such as the following: "Although [Osip:] did not seek happiness, he described everything he valued in terms of pleasure and play: 'Thanks to the wonderful bounty of Christianity, the whole of our two-thousand-year-old culture is the setting of the world free for play, for spiritual pleasure, for the free imitation of Christ.'"? [page 267:] One last comment about HOPE AGAINST HOPE is the perspective it provides for reading and evaluating other books on the period. HOPE AGAINST HOPE is an almost Biblically rigorous metric for ethical and moral decision. Stimulated by this memoir, I've been reading or re-reading LIFE AND FATE, Bulgakov's diaries and letters collected as MANUSCRIPTS DON'T BURN, Bulgakov's novel THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, Schklovsky's THEORY OF PROSE, Sebag-Montefiore's YOUNG STALIN, and a fascinating biography by Tom Reiss of the early Stalin biographer Essad Bay, who was actually a Jewish resident of Baku named Lev Nussenbaim. All of these books read differently in the pure light of HOPE AGAINST HOPE; behaviour and poses which seem plausible and even praiseworthy simply look inadequate against the standard set by the Mandelstams. Everything, everybody, looks inadequate.